Herak Ka-Agra was born on the Hegemony planet of Aratoht. Taught from a young age through propaganda only, and never having met her parents, the young biotic was quick on her way to becoming an important cog in the machine that was the Hegemony.
When she was twenty-five, she was assigned to duty in the Batarian State Arms; the government run weapons and technology manufacturer for all Batarians (And many "unaffiliated" Batarian terrorists.). She was assigned to the Biotic R&D division of Batarian State Arms, which utilized her technical prowess as a bio-amp developer, along with her biotic affinity as a Shock Trooper in training.
Her first off world assignment, when she was twenty-seven, took her to the agrarian world of Asteria, in the Terminus Systems. There, after her comrades killed a small commune of farmers, she found one of the dead colonist's datapad, and discovered a wealth of human literature on it: from Marx's Communist Manifesto to Paine's Common Sense. Curious by the alien writings, she downloaded the library and heavily encrypted it on her omni-tool.
For years, Herak studied these books. She would run a program that would randomly encrypt the files, decrypt them to read, and encrypt them again when she was done. Soon, the Hegemony was a place of disillusionment for her. Quietly, when she turned thirty, she stowed away on an automated cargo ship in a pressure suit she had stolen from Batarian State Arms, and vanished.
That was in 2185, days before the Alpha Relay exploded, taking out the system and Aratoht with it. She was assumed a casualty.
Herak fled to Omega, where she worked as a merc for a time. Her biotics were valued, as were the ruthless techniques she had learned in the Hegemony. Soon she began to hate life as a merc, too, and she found work as a Bio-Amp developer for the Sirta Corporation. After working at their facility on Chohe for a time, she was transferred to the corporate laboratory on Noveria, where the development of useful but illegal tools like Medi-Gel can flourish, and so too can new leaps in biotic technology.
During the Reaper Invasion, Herak saw relatively little of the decimation. The Sirta R&D labs, buried deeply in the southern ice cap (icier cap, perhaps), were viewed largely as too costly for Cerberus to consider an asset. Of the few Cerberus scouts that were sent there, Herak, along with the stationed ERCS Guards, was able to dispatch them.